The best moment in this concert celebrating Michael Nyman's 70th birthday came when the composer walked up to the stage to thank the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its conductor, Josep Vincent. Reaching up to shake Vincent's hand, he tightened his grip briefly before pulling himself up to the stage, a gesture happily rewarded by a firm pull from the nimble conductor and a standing ovation from the audience.

Given the decidedly lacklustre quality of the evening's music-making, however, the ovation was probably aimed at Nyman's achievement in composing some of the best film scores of recent decades. It was disappointing therefore that so little of these featured in the evening's concert, although the air lifted briefly during the buzz of recognition that greeted the famous Chasing Sheep sequence from 1982's The Draughtsman's Contract.

Nyman himself took the podium for the Draughtsman's Contract arrangements, beating time in a forcefully literal way, which nonetheless seemed to catch the players entirely off-guard. With the orchestra supplemented by a synthesised harpsichord, amplified through a raised central speaker system, problems of balance and coordination abounded, yielding a performance of singular lifelessness.

Nyman is presently engaged in composing a sequence of 19 symphonies intended as an "extended network" of archival revisiting of his own and others' music. If the rather patchy Second Symphony, whose premiere concluded the concert, is a reliable guide, the composer would be better off trying to recapture the adventurous spirit of much of his earlier work, rather than trying to reuse its material. As in 2003's violin concerto, played here by Alexander Balanescu, there's a sense that the composer's conceptual ambitions override his musical sense. The evening's best offering was the (revised) saxophone concerto, Where the Bee Dances, whose meditative opening and closing passages were memorably handled by John Harle.